#38 - Bake 100 Different Cookies Update

I made some of my very favorite cookies today! In fact, after One Girl Cookies Orange Butter Drops, these are my second favorites :p I have so many memories attached to these cookies. They're basically mexican wedding cookies but instead of using crushed almonds, I use crushed pecans. There was a chain of bakeries in New Orleans when I was growing up called McKenzies and my aunt Shirley would take us there every Friday and we'd get to pick something to eat. I'd get these :p McKenzies is long gone but any New Orleans native can tell you tons of memories associated with this bakery and what their favorite pastry was from there.

They're SUCH an easy cookie to make too! Here's how you make them. You need:

1 Cup (2 sticks) of butter at room temperature
1/2 Cup of white sugar
2 Teaspoons of vanilla extract
2 Teaspoons of water
2 Cups of all-purpose flour
1 Cup of chopped pecans (you can use different nuts if you want)
1/2 Cup of confectioner's sugar

Start by creaming the butter with the sugar.....I use an electric mixer and beat the butter and sugar together for about 3 minutes on medium until it's light and fluffy. Then add the vanilla and water. Slowly add in your flour while the mixer's on and then add in your chopped pecans or other nuts. Refrigerate the dough for 3 hours. It looks like this afterwards!

 

I used a cookie scoop but you don't have to, just scoop out round balls onto an unprepared (non-greased) cookie pan and bake at 325 degrees for 15-20 minutes. I baked mine right in the middle there for 17 minutes and 30 seconds and they came out perfect! They look like this:

 

Now comes the best part! Put your powdered sugar into a paper bag or ziploc bag and very gently shake the cookies in the sugar coating them. Don't be too rough or they'll crack. Also, don't try to do too many at once. I shook up three cookies at a time and it worked just fine. They look like this:

 

Last step...enjoy!

#38 - Bake 100 Different Cookies Update

 

I LOVE these cookies. They remind me of being a little kid and of holidays. In the family, we call them "Aunt Elma's Cookies" or "Winn-Dixie Cookies" but they're actually called Yellow Cake Cookies and I feel a bit like I'm cheating by counting them for this goal because they're so simple :p The family name for the cookies is because my Aunt Elma who's long passed away was famous for making these cookies and she always made them with Winn-Dixie brand yellow cake mix. Here's how easy they are:

In a bowl mix a box of yellow cake mix, two eggs, 1/2 cup of oil and 1 cup of whatever the hell you want to put in them! For this batch I used a mix of white chocolate chips, chocolate chips and heath bar candy pieces. Bake them at 350 degrees for 14 minutes. Ta-da!

Seriously....simplest cookie ever and SO GOOD! If you want to feel less like you're cheating you can make your own yellow cake mix of course, but I always just buy one, lol. Ah well.

#39 - Bake 50 Different Pies Update

I grew up with this pie and I'll always have memories of my gram attached to it. Lemon meringue pie. One of my favorites. For almost every holiday for as long as I can remember, my gram has ALWAYS had a lemon meringue pie at her house....this is my mom's mom. Right before I moved into my apartment, I told my gram at Easter that I was going to have to get her recipe for lemon meringue pie from her one day. I said it laughing, thinking it was a secret recipe that she was going to take to the grave with her because it tastes SO. DAMN. GOOD. So I can't even BEGIN to tell you how hard I laughed when she nonchalantly went into her pantry and came out with a box of jello lemon pudding mix and said "here you go!" Yep....she uses the recipe right off the lemon pudding jello box. She makes her meringue a tiny bit differently, but I use the meringue recipe off of the pudding box too. Three egg white and 1/3 cup of sugar. And I use a frozen pie crust too. This is a pretty easy pie to make but it's SO DAMN GOOD! See that, all in caps twice in this post....I promise you it really is :p

#90 - Bake 50 Things that Aren't Cookies, Pies or Cakes Update

One of my absolute favorite things in the world to eat is baked apples. My mom used to make them for us when we were little kids and she'd make them very very simple. Just sprinkle some cinnamon and butter on them and bake them. Well I decided to get fancy the other day :p My family had come over for the Saints game on Sunday and I had cut up some honeycrisp apples and served them with a bowl of nutella to dip them in (best snack ever) but had lots of left over apple slices! I also had a bosc pear that I had been meaning to try.

So I decided to peel the pear and peel the remaining apples and bake them. And then get a little bit more fancy :P First, I heated my oven to 350 and melted about a half stick of butter in the bottom of a glass dish while I was peeling everything. Once that was melted, I mixed 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of white sugar and a splash of vanilla extract in with the butter to make a caramel base that would cook into a liquid and laid the apples and pears on top of that and let them cook on top of that for 30 minutes, then flipped everything over and let them cook for 30 more minutes until all of the fruit was soft. They came out looking like this:

I took the fruit out of the dish and put it into it's own dish:

Already looks yummy, right? But that wasn't good enough for me :p I was left with all of this yummy caramel-y goodness that had liquified in the glass dish. So I put that in a saucepot on the stove, threw in about 6 or 7 cloves and about 4 tablespoons of almond milk and brought it to a boil, constantly stirring it to reduce it...I cooked it I guess for about 5 minutes. In the end it looked like this:

I poured all that back over the fruit:

Then put some in a bowl and to make it extra yummy, I put some cold sweet vanilla almond milk on top of it. It basically tasted like melted vanilla ice cream making it taste like a perfect pie a la mode! This was SO GOOD!!!!! Good way to start off this goal ;)

#98 - Bake 50 Cakes Update

The Beekman Boys released a new cookbook! A cookbook that's nothing but desserts.....dangerous....It's the Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook and it had plenty of things that I wanted to try, but the first was this one, a lemon and orange olive oil poundcake with a lemon glaze. Sounds nice and healthy, right :p What I really loved about this recipe is the simplicity and the naturalness of it. The cake is just cake flour, sugar, eggs, olive oil, lemon and orange zest and fresh squeezed lemon and orange juice...not lemon and orange "flavoring". The real stuff! And the icing is just confectioners sugar mixed lemon juice.

The recipe calls for an entire cup of olive oil! So I knew that with all of that oil mixed with 4 eggs, it was going to be quite a moist cake! Not to mention, quite a heartburn making cake, which I can testify, it is :p But when I cut the first slice....so beautiful just how moist it was!

And then of course came the taste test. I was worried that with all of that lemon juice it would be too tart. I tasted the glaze by itself and it was REALLY tart! But when you spoon the glaze over the cake, you end up with most of it on the parchment paper underneath the cooling rack :p But it adds a nice hard glaze on top that is fairly tart, but it's PERFECTLY balanced with the cake that's not overly sweet, but perfectly moist and just oh. so. good. Seriously I love this cake and it's going to take all of my willpower to limit myself to one piece a day....I think I'm going to have to bring half of this to my mom :p